Previously on Development that Pays...
I joined a new team.
It was a team that “did Agile”. It was doing all the rituals. It had all the artefacts.
There was a reorganisation.
The Team Split in two.
One team stuck with Scrum… (working in two week sprints)
One Team moved to Kanban (working in a continuous fashion)
Team Kanban thought they were the hot stuff…
… but its board told a different story.
Then one day, our Project Manager come Scrum Master come all round superstar, resigned.
Hi, this is Gary,
Welcome to Development That Pays.
It was a dark time for Team Scrum.
We'd just lost our awesome project manager.
News came in that an external "Agile Coach" was going to be “parachuted in”.
Someone looked him up online.
- Very high profile.
- Very expensive, we guessed.
And very, very… KANBAN.
As I said back in Part I, people who “do Agile” often have strongly held views about
how things should be done.
And our ongoing grudge match with Team Kanban had only served to entrench our view that
Scrum was awesome and Kanban was rubbish.
So we were ready for him. We’d expected him to be pushy and directive. And we intended
to push back. Hard.
As it turned out our new Coach - let’s call him The Agile One - was neither pushy
nor directive.
At our first meeting he said that he had a new (agile) board that he’d like us to try.
But only if we wanted to to.
He unrolled the A2 paper that he’s brought with him.
The key to it, he explained, it that each column is just wide enough for a Post-it note
And high enough for just five.
“This is important. By limiting the number of cards in each column, we make sure that
things get across the board as quickly as possible.”
A couple of team said there was no chance that Post-it would stick long enough
It would necessary to bring some BluTak into play.
I smiled to myself. If our “resistance” centred around the relative adhesive properties
of Post-its and BluTak, the Agile One had already won.
The paper board - together with our winning combination of Post-its AND BluTak
Taught us to to keep our Work in Progress (WIP) under control.
We had learned our first lesson.
At the time of his arrival, a number of cards on the board were blocked.
The Agile One asked about one of them.
"We're waiting for so-and-so to get back to us"
“What can we do to move that along?”
I’d say: “ I’ll email him today”.
WRONG ANSWER!
Where’s his office?
In the next building.
"Let's go and talk to him."
“When?"
"Right now”
And off we walked off together.
And we found the person. And we had a relaxed conversation. The Agile One asked questions.
And what was blocked became unblocked.
None of us could match The Agile One’s ability to make problems disappear, but we did - in
time - learn the value of talking to people face to face to get issues unblocked. And
- in the case of new cards - to make sure that they didn’t get blocked in the first
place.
That was our second lesson.
One morning, The Agile One brought a guest to stand-up. It transpired that The Agile
One was moving on to bigger and better things. The new person was his replacement.
If the Agile One was a little bit Obi Wan Kenobi, the new guy was more Yoda:
a little bit annoying, and very into "basic training”.
It wasn't long before we received our first edict.
"Release more often, you must”. (He didn’t really talk like that.)
We explained that it was a painful process, very time consuming and prone to error.
If you're not good at something, do it more often you must.
The last thing we wanted to hear, but the first thing we needed to learn.
Eventually, we were releasing more often that any other team in the company. AND doing so
with the lowest failure rate in the company.
We had learned out third lesson well.
The Agile Team that I joined in 2012 was the best performing team I’d ever worked in.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a 7 for performance.
On the same scale, other teams I’d worked with would score a 5 at most.
When Team Scrum split into two and Team Kanban was born, the members of Team Kanban thought
they’d moved ahead.
True, they were releasing more often. But their Work In Progress was out of control.
They score a 6.
Thanks to Obi Wan and Yoda, my team went from High Performing Scrum Team to VERY high
performing Kanban Team. We were performing at level 8 within a month and at 9 within
three.
I’ve yet to experience a 10.
Thank you very much for watching. I hope you enjoyed the Tale of Two Agile Teams
This is the last Episode of Development that Pays for 2015. I'll be back with a brand new
episode on Wednesday 6th January 2016.
May I take this opportunity to wish you and yours a very Happy Christmas.